Using Blurbs in LiveWhale Calendar (3.0+)

Blurbs are small pieces of static content that can be managed directly in the LiveWhale Calendar 3.0 back-end — no code changes required. They’re a great way to let calendar editors maintain things like welcome messages, sidebar links, or other recurring bits of text that live outside of your events.

Questions we’ll answer in this guide include:

What are blurb types and how do they relate to individual blurbs?
How do you manage blurb content — ordering, showing, and hiding individual blurbs?
Who has permission to add and edit blurbs?
How can developers display blurbs in your theming?

Blurb types and blurbs

The organizing principle here is simple: a Blurb Type is the container, and Blurbs are the individual pieces of WYSIWYG content inside it.

For example, you might have a Blurb Type called “Welcome Message” and inside it, one or more blurbs with the actual text your editors maintain. Or a “Sidebar Quick Links” Blurb Type containing several blurbs, each a different section of text and links. Most groups might manage just a single blurb (if any), but you can also have multiple blurbs, or keep Hidden versions that you set to Live at certain times of year.

Blurb editing example

Blurb Types are shared across all groups in your calendar. (Two special system Blurb Types—Help Topics and Today Facts—are the exception; those live only in the Admin group.) Individual blurbs, though, belong to a specific group, which is what allows you to show different blurb content to different groups on the same calendar.

Managing blurbs

Within a Blurb Type, each individual blurb can be:

Set to Live or Hidden – hidden blurbs won’t appear on the front-end
Starred – to mark it as featured, if your theming makes use of that
Ordered using balloons – LiveWhale’s balloon system lets you float items toward the top of a list by adding balloons to them. The more balloons an item has, the higher it appears. Click to add or remove balloons from any blurb to adjust its position.

Permissions

There are two permission levels relevant to blurbs:

Manage blurbs – Users with this permission can add and edit blurbs within their group(s). This is the level you’d assign to calendar editors who need to maintain static content like welcome messages or quick links, without giving them broader administrative access.

Administrator – Only administrators can create and edit Blurb Types themselves. Think of this as the setup step: admins define the containers, and blurb managers fill them.

Displaying blurbs in your theming (For Developers)

Once your Blurb Types are set up and your editors are adding content, you’ll need to wire them into your calendar theming to display them on the front-end. There are a few common patterns:

Display just a single blurb:

From the blurbs manager, you can click “Get Code” to open a modal with copy/paste code in it. Note, this code will only work inside of your LiveWhale Calendar theme and includes (not on an external website). Also, if you set the specified blurb to hidden it will not appear on the front-end.

Blurb Get Code button

Display blurbs of a given type from one specific group:

<widget type="blurbs">
    <arg id="type">Sidebar Content</arg>
    <arg id="group">Marketing & Communications</arg>
</widget>

Display blurbs of a type from the current calendar group:

Using group=me, individual Group Calendar pages can show blurbs (if any live ones exist) from the current group.

<widget type="blurbs">
    <arg id="type">Sidebar Content</arg>
    <arg id="group">me</arg>
</widget>

Display blurbs from the current group, with a fallback to another group:

The fallback setting lets you specify a second set of conditions to use if the first returns no results. The most common use is with a group=me setting – so if the current group doesn’t have any blurbs of the specified type, it falls back to a default group (like “Marketing & Communications”) instead.

<widget type="blurbs">
    <arg id="type">Sidebar Content</arg>
    <arg id="group">me</arg>
    <arg id="fallback">
        <arg id="group">Marketing & Communications</arg>
    </arg>
</widget>

Specifying HTML markup for your blurbs:

You can specify markup to go around each individual blurb (format) and/or the entire widget results (format_widget). More about Widget Formatting.

<widget type="blurbs">
    <arg id="type">Sidebar Content</arg>
    <arg id="format">
        <div class="sidebar-text"><h4>{title}</h4>{body}</div>
    </arg>
    <arg id="format_widget">
        <div class="sidebar-section">{widget}</div>
    </arg>
</widget>

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